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Are cubicles going extinct?
Inside Mr. Youth's cubicle-less office.
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Kai Ryssdal: This is the time of year when people start looking ahead to try to get some feeling for what the future might bring. Take the office, a place we spend a lot of time. It's been changing quite a bit as businesses try to save space and money.
Today the Los Angeles Times observed the cubicle is shrinking. We sent reporter -- and cubicle veteran -- Stacey Vanek Smith to explore the cubicle of the future.
Stacey Vanek Smith: Full disclosure: I love my cubicle. But evidently, this makes me a workplace throwback. Tom Polucci is director of interior design for arichitecture firm HOK.
Tom Polucci: The Dilbert cartoon where everyone's working in a cubicle farm, that's really disappeared.
Polucci says cubicles are shrinking -- most now are 6 feet by 6 feet. Part of it is money. Office space is a company's biggest expense after salaries. But it's also just the way we work now.
Polucci: Workplace has become much more collaborative. You might be sitting in a smaller personal space, or what I like to call a me space, because you're tending to work more in environments when you're shared with your colleagues. And I like to refer to those spaces as we spaces.
One workspace with a lot of we-space is social marketing firm Mr. Youth and CrowdTap. Most people work at tables or have their desks in clusters. Company CFO Dan LaFontaine says it's fun and practical.
Dan LaFontaine: It's incredibly efficient. Rather than have some kind of formal meeting, it's very easy just to grab a couple of people and stand around one area very quickly and get done what you need to get done.
LaFontaine's workers are young -- average age? About 26. He says they don't really want the privacy of an office or a cubicle.
LaFontaine: They're putting their whole lives up on Facebook and on Twitter and everywhere else anyway. There's no real reason they should hide behind a cubicle wall.
Still, LaFontaine says, the office of the future does have some drawbacks.
LaFontaine: Sometimes it gets a little bit noisy and there are those days when you want to walk in and just have peace and quiet and get things done.
Vanek Smith: Did a microwave just go off?
LaFontaine: That was a microwave, I believe that's popcorn you smell.
In New York, I'm Stacey Vanek Smith from Marketplace.
I have worked in all the environments at all levels and see the value and downsides of each had...but that was the past. I no longer see the "need" for most employees to commute to an office environment to work unless they prefer it. I prefer a choice of being home or office based. I trust my employees are working and we collaborate by skype...and we save the planet by not commuting :)
Cliff and Tin man, I share your pain. It's almost impossible to get deep statistical analysis done with everyone around you chatting away about current affairs.... The open plan concept works really well for collaboration, but someone has to get the thinking done in the first place before we all collaborate on it ..... I suspect the interior design community does not understand this, being focused on "the look" and the budget, rather than the quality of work to be done in that environment.
Open spaces tend to be very noisy and distracting, especially when several people are on the phone trying to conduct business at the same time. I don't think open concept offices are actually efficient. Customers on the other end of a phone call can hear all that background noise and it sounds like a boiler room. Keep the cubicles.
I am sure it is a generational thing... I am old school value private space... I think a public coffee house or public library sometimes has more private areas than an office in cube land...... I have a public life and private one...its a new world and private and public are blended... I have adapted but quite frankly I even think a cubical is not private enough...miss my own office... I am an a cubical and have not been in one for 33 years... but I am lucky I have a job... maybe the future for me is to work at home
My boss from the UK says they don't do cubicles over there and so we don't do it over here. So much nicer to just turn around and ask your coworker a question or share what you're working on! As long as everyone exercises courtesy, there's no risk of lots of distractions.
I am a supervisor and my three (3) colleagues who are supervisors also share a flat table out in an open area. There are two (2) PC's with two of us on each one. No drawers on the desk. Our "drawers" are in short, small roll-around filing cabinets. We used to have cubicles and we had to share those.
I truly hate this change.
First, they took away real walls and now they want to take away the only remaining protection I have from the constant distraction of people around me. I already have to work at home or off hours to be productive and this will only make it worse.
Stacey, Caught your program this afternoon. Check out the link below. A good example of the future of workstations. "STAKS" is a product line my partners and I designed for First Office in Indiana. Designed with everything in mind that you spoke of today. Pertinent program today, validates what we were trying to do. John Duffy http://www.firstoffice.com/products/crossover/staks/
